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“AllOut.org has temporarily disabled the campaign page of its website due to a cyber attack by hackers. In the attack, hackers added roughly 3000-5000 comments and signatures onto the petition. AllOut.org is currently in the process of removing those signatures, but can verify that over 60,000 members have sign onto the petition and continue to urge Electronic Arts to stay away from the dark side.”

The Sith are getting a bum wrap here, as always. But I digress.

More to the point, basically everyone I’ve seen comment on this has immediately rushed to the conclusion that EA has set up a spambot campaign to inflate signatures and create the veneer of support. EA has been caught with their hands in this cookie jar before, after all, when the game publisher staged a fake protest at E3 over the game Dante’s Inferno:

“Electronic Arts has admitted that the Dante’s Inferno protest during E3 was staged by a guerrilla marketing agency,” Joystiq reported at the time. “The publisher confirmed to the AP that the firm hired 20 people to hold signs like “Just say Infer-NO” and “Trade in your PlayStation for a PrayStation.” There’s got to be a better way to promote the game.”

The only problem is, right now everyone is leaping to conclusions and there’s absolutely no way to confirm any of it. I tend to hew to the whole “trust but verify” policy when it comes to, well, just about anybody (whether that’s other bloggers, industry reps, commenters, or friends and family members.)

It’s possible that EA is behind the spambots, or has hired someone to use spam to inflate the signatures (if this is the case, they should fire whoever it is for such a clumsy job). It’s also possible that somebody else is hitting the petition with spam precisely because it could be used against EA. Never underestimate anyone’s ability or capacity for deceit. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.

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Hey Erik, I just want to thank you for being the only person, other than /v/, to be smart enough to tell when EA is lying to people. You seem to be the only smart gaming journalist who can see what’s obvious unlike all the other gaming “Journalist”

I am fairly sure the images were sent to him by /v/, I saw it in the daily “EA is bad here are some shopped screens showing them kill babies” thread. Not to demean his crime solving abilities, Erik is one of the last bastions of a free gaming community.

You covered both sides of the story and examined multiple possible explanations, which is what a good journalist should do. If this were any other gaming “journalist” site they would belittle us, automatically side with the publishers, and dismiss us and any notion of foul play involved. You don’t need to come to the same conclusions as some, that this is a PR stunt, but merely the acknowledgement of such a possibility is more than we could ask for in the current climate of gaming coverage. Thank you once again Mr. Kain.

Thanks, howlow. I think it’s important to treat the whole thing as soberly as possible. Conjecture and fact can exist across a wide valley from one another, and right now we have very little of the former, and lots of the latter to go off of.

Bioware declared in 2009 that ‘homosexuality does not exist in Star Wars’ and prohibited people from even using the word gay within their forums. In Dragon Age 2, which was published after the EA takeover, a character (Serendipity) is a transsexual prostitute played for humor – she is a baritone. And now EA plays the ‘homophobes hate us’ card?

Games such as Bully, Fable and the Fallout series have homosexual relationships/themes in game and they have not caused a torrent of “homophobes” to descend on their developers. I think it’s high time EA stop hiding behind the excuse of ” They hate us because they are homophobes” which to me, I find even more disrespectful.

A pefect fucking smoke screen for the horrid few weeks EA has been having. Very convenient I must say..

And the sad part is Benjamin Cohen,Tech Correspondant for Channel 4 News,Pink News Founder and all round LGBT activist and campaigner is trying to rope in celebs like Stephen Fry andCharlie Brooker,insistent that the whole thing is an attack on EA by homophobes and can’t see just how well it actually suits them(EA).